django-router 1.0.2

Use simple decorators on views instead of maintaining lengthy urls.py

Django Router

You have a data and you need to provide some CRUD functionality for it quickly. What do you do?

1. Create model
2. Add some views
3. ????
4. PROFIT!

Right? Right! Done! And nothing works! Why? URLS.PY!!! You always forget this ones? I have a solution!

Maintaining Django's urls.py can become really annoying when you have a lot of apps with dozens urls in each. Other frameworks deal with it in elegant ways, like Flask's @app.route decorator. This project brings same concept to Django by adding @router decorator functions.

Installation

Package is hosted in pypi.org thus you can use any tool that works with it to install the package:

pip install django-router

poetry add django-router

Add django_router to your INSTALLED_APPS

# superduperproject/settings.py
INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    "django_router",
    ...
]

---

Modify project urls.py (the top one)

# superduperproject/urls.py
from django_router import router

# the only time you need to modify any `urls.py`
urlpatterns = router.urlpatterns

# or with existing ones
urlpatterns = [
    ...
] + router.urlpatterns

Usage

Just use decorator in your apps' views.py. Django Router uses autodiscovery feature, so make sure views you're interested in are either inside views.py or get imported into it.

# employees/views.py
from django_router import router
from employees.models import Employee
from django.shortcuts import render
from django.views.generic.edit import CreateView

# Works with function based views
# Resulting url will be `/employees/employee_list/`
@router.path()
def employee_list(request):
    employees = Employee.objects.all()
    return render(request, 'employee_list.html', {'employees':employees})

# As well as with class based views
# Resulting url will be `/employees/employee_create/`
@router.path()
def EmployeeCreate(CreateView):
    model = Employee

And that's it! No more need to deal with lengthy urls.py!

How it works

Router has two functions path and re_path which work exactly the same as django.urls functions you already know. Except that you don't even need to specify url or name.

View module path is used to determine the resulting URL prefix. So URL for views in employees/views.py app will start with /employees/... , employees/manage/views.py - /employees/manage/... URL etc.

Also first module will be used as a namespace for reverse

reverse('employees:employee_list')

NOTICE: nested namespaces are not supported for now.

App has some functionality builtin for automatic pattern and name generation.

For FBVs if no name is provided function name will be used, camel case will be turned into snake case:

# same as path('import_employees/', import_employees, name='import_employees')
@router.path()
def import_employees(request):
    ...

# same as path('import_employees/', ImportEmployees.as_view(), name='import_employees')
@router.path()
class ImportEmployees(View):
    ...

For generic Django views(CreateView,UpdateView,ListView,DetailView,DeleteView) there's some builtin autonaming behavior which tries to be logical.

@route.path()
class NewEmployeeView(CreateView):
    model = Employee

# is same as
path('employee_create/', NewEmployeeView.as_view(), name='employee_create')

Of course you can specify path and name as usual:

@router.path('im_emp/', name='employees_import')
def import_employees(request):
    ...

Settings

Settings for the project are mostly to control autonaming behavior. These are default settings for the project

ROUTER_SETTINGS={
    "NAME_WORDS_SEPARATOR": "_",
    "TRY_USE_MODEL_NAMES": True,
    "MODEL_NAMES_MONOLITHIC": True,
    "DJANGO_ADMIN_LIKE_NAMES": False,
}

---

NAME_WORDS_SEPARATOR: a separator char that'll be used during camel to snake case conversion in view names:

@router.path()
class EmployeeList(ListView):
    model = Employee

NAME_WORDS_SEPARATOR = "_"

path('employee_list/', EmployeeList.as_view(), name='employee_list')

NAME_WORDS_SEPARATOR = "-"

path('employee_list/', EmployeeList.as_view(), name='employee-list')

---

TRY_USE_MODEL_NAMES: try to use model name for view naming within CBV while forming URLs

@router.path()
class Employees(ListView):
    model = Employee

TRY_USE_MODEL_NAMES = True

path('employee_list/', Employees.as_view(), name='employee_list')

TRY_USE_MODEL_NAMES = False

path('employees/', Employees.as_view(), name='employees')

---

MODEL_NAMES_MONOLITHIC: only works when TRY_USE_MODEL_NAMES = True, control whether separator is used for model names consisting of multiple words

@router.path()
class EmployeeAddressList(ListView):
    model = EmployeeAddress

MODEL_NAMES_MONOLITHIC = True

path('employeeaddress/', EmployeesAddressList.as_view(), name='employeeaddress_list')

MODEL_NAMES_MONOLITHIC = False

path('employee_address/', EmployeesAddressList.as_view(), name='employee_address_list')

---

DJANGO_ADMIN_LIKE_NAMES: if true uses strings like in Django admin for view names and paths

• ListView: changelist
• UpdateView: change
• CreateView: add

@router.path()
class EmployeeCreate(CreateView):
    model = Employee

path('employee/add/', EmployeeCreate.as_view(), name='employee_add')

Management commands

python manage.py router_list - to see list of all available routes created by the router.

python manage.py router_urls - to see list of all available routes as if they're in urls.py